Travel and Expense
Recognising the Accounts Payable Heroes in Your Business
In my role as an SAP Concur Accounts Payable Consultant, I get the chance to speak with AP every day, so I’ve been hearing first-hand the challenges facing these teams.
In support of the Accounts Payable Association’s annual AP Appreciation Week (17-21 May 2021), we at SAP Concur also want to take a moment to celebrate the hard work and determination shown by everyone in the AP/P2P industry during an exceptionally tough year.
From driving back and forth to various offices to collect invoices, to chasing up with employees who are working from multiple locations, not to mention having less time to process ever more invoices – your work has been well and truly cut out for you.
Here are some of the themes that have been cropping up in the past 12 months. Do any of these sound familiar to you?
The Strain of Keeping A Paper-Based Process Moving
A manual process was hard enough when everyone worked in one or two offices. Suddenly, you’ve got hundreds of offices, that is, one for each of your staff members. Keeping tabs on everything and shepherding the company invoices is harder than ever. It’s even worse if you still have paper invoices being sent in the post. I heard a story of a partner at a big company driving to their head office to collect the invoices each week then actually driving to employee’s homes to get them distributed!
An Increasingly Stressful Month-End
Month-end has always been a stressful time. How often have you found yourself desperately chasing approvals on the last working day of the month? The process has got even more stressful in the past year. First, you’ve got to track the right person down, which means phone calls and emails, not a walk down a corridor. Then you have to persuade them to drop what they’re doing, log onto their VPN and log into a separate invoice approval system. All to approve a single invoice. You know as well as I do it’s not always going to happen.
A Heightened Risk of Fraud
To add to that, just recently, I’ve been getting an insight into the level of fraud faced by AP professionals when I changed my LinkedIn profile to update my job title to Accounts Payable Consultant.
Since then, I’ve been bombarded with invoices seemingly from reputable companies, or even appearing to come from my boss or colleagues. They’re all for a relatively small amount that’s unlikely to raise suspicion. But many of them are fake and sent by fraudsters who’ve targeted me because of my job title. I’d only have to lose concentration for a second for one of them to go through the system.
A world where communication is difficult and time is tight, is a world that’s perfect for fraudsters – and that’s just what we’re seeing. Nearly 40% of firms experienced a year-on-year increase in fraud during 2020 with an average loss totalling £245,000.
Creating an AP Process That’s Fit-For-Purpose
This time last year, we talked of things going back to the way they used to be. Now, we know we are living in a world where remote and hybrid working is a fact of life and will be for some time to come. It means we can’t continue to brush the problems with a paper-based AP process under the carpet. We have to fix it so it works in our new world of work.
One way automation can make life easier for AP and your employees is to enable invoice reviews and approvals through apps. So for example, with the SAP Concur mobile app, invoices ping through to an approver’s mobile, so they’re instantly alerted and can approve on-the-go, with no need to log into a separate system. It typically reduces approval cycle times by 50%, so you are in control of payments and cash flow.
If there’s one area AP staff grumble about over and over, it’s mundane data capture. You have a lot better things to be spending your time on. Invoice Capture combines the best of optical character recognition (OCR), machine learning and human expertise to genuinely remove manual data entry and validation from your processes. It typically returns up to 70% of your invoice capture time with a high degree of accuracy.
The biggest benefit to AP automation is that it gives you transparency, so you know the liabilities coming your way. No more being taken by surprise by an invoice you knew nothing about. For one company I spoke to, the final straw was an invoice of £80,000 that was already two weeks overdue by the time it arrived with the AP team! When you’re an SMB or growing company, you simply don’t have the luxury of having such big blind spots in your business.
Finance automation solutions like Concur Invoice give you back time to notice the suspicious invoices and do more productive work and less data entry. Another terrifying statistic – one AP person I heard of has to replace their keyboard every three months because they do so much data entry!
In an average business, two thirds of overheads are supplier invoices. It means anything the business can do to improve the process and reduce cycle times will not only pay dividends but make work more fulfilling for finance. And surely that’s the best way to thank AP teams?
To learn more about how invoice automation can help you in the new world of work, register for our AP Anywhere – Automate Capture, Process, Pay webinar.